Book Summary: Vasudha Dalmia’s Poetics, Plays, and Performances; The Politics of Modern Indian Theatre
This book implies an exploration into the evolution of ‘Indian National Theatre’. I am attempting a re-work to examine the many adventures behind the creation (rather, ‘creationing’) of a ‘national theatre’, its negotiation, assimilation, and in many cases erasure of various similar traditions deemed outside the scope- the scope of the nationalistic venture.
Dalmia’s most works demonstrates the intersection of Indian nation state, its dissonant interaction with the performative and the cultural realms. She settles on such area to argue that the quest for a national theatre was not a straightforward, rectilinear journey but rather one entangled with various convolutions. The book explores the possible establishment of this new category with Hindi as mode and possibly medium. It traces the work of three major figures of what would be later labelled as Hindi Theatre; Bhartendu Harishchandra, Jay Shankar Prasad, and Mohan Rakesh.
Bhartendu Harishchandra- the foremost precursor, Dalmia suggests, and his endeavours in setting forward a theatre deliberately moulded around nationalistic aims. She illustrates the constant interactions and negotiations with the domineering role of Western orientalists, their self-assumed roles of mediators, and a subsequent search for an escape by Indian playwrights alongside aesthetics and nationalistic orientation. She carefully fixes upon Harishchandra’s dramatic treatise Natak (1883). Though, Harishchandra has been taken as the earliest precursors, less is said of the factors influencing him, and his negotiation with the affixed status of Hindi as a national language.
To be continued…